He smiled as I released his hand. Another long silence passed between us, and this time it was enough for the awkwardness to completely settle in. “I’ve got to go,” I told him, hoping my parents had called a truce. “We… I have somewhere to be.” I was embarrassed to say where.

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “What time is it?”

“Like four, maybe?”

“Oh. I’ve got somewhere to be too.” He jogged away, then bent down and slid his body between the logs of the fence that surrounded our property. He didn’t look back.

“See you later, alligator,” he sang when he was on the other side. I breathed hard as I walked back to my house, his musical voice ringing in my ears.

It was still ringing in my ears as my parents and I slid into the pew at church that night. My parents were both tense. I stood between them, going through the motions: lazily crossing myself, bowing my head, mumbling prayers, and fudging verses I didn’t know—pretending to be a good little Catholic. My parents went to church because that’s what they’d been raised to do. Sometimes we missed mass, sometimes we showed up in less than our Sunday best, sometimes we didn’t have anything to put in the collection basket, and we hadn’t been to confession in years, despite all the sins we’d piled up. And we always skipped out after communion. It was about convenience: if there was something better to do, we did that instead.

Truthfully, I only went to church when my parents insisted. I wasn’t religious. I knew my parents were staying together, as miserable as they were, partly because they were raised to believe that divorce was a sin, but mostly because they were comfortable in their misery. I didn’t think there was an afterlife waiting for me. I didn’t think God existed. I hated the fact that all these good Catholics would sit there and pray and sing and listen to Father Brady talk about the Golden Rule, then cut each other off trying to be the first ones to leave the parking lot.

What I thought was, You don’t need God to be good, and some people who follow God blindly are the worst.

But that night something happened. When the music started and the procession came down the center aisle, who was first in line, holding the cross? Declan Weeks. I blinked, as if my vision would clear and reveal him to be a mirage. But there he was, in a white robe, climbing the stairs to the altar. He bowed, then turned, and his eyes swept over me for the briefest of moments.